Oakland City Council Delays Parking Vote for Two Weeks

The Oakland City Council voted early this morning to delay action on proposed parking changes until its next meeting. After three hours of discussion that spilled well beyond midnight, a proposal to roll back parking meter enforcement from 8 p.m. to 6 p.m. was narrowly defeated, despite calls for immediate action from dozens of merchants who attended the meeting.

In late June, the council voted to raise the parking meter rates by 50 cents to two dollars an hour, extend weekday meter enforcement to 8 p.m., and authorize more aggressive enforcement. Those changes have angered some residents and sparked cries from merchants that the new policies are hurting business.

Several councilmembers were skeptical of the options presented for making up the $900,000 budget gap the rolled-back enforcement hours would create, and requested a more detailed proposal from staff members. "Without an actual proposal for people to speak to, it's hard to say that staff will just come up with something," said Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan.

The rejected proposal, presented by Councilmembers Jean Quan, Patricia Kernighan and Council President Jane Brunner, would have made up for the gap with a mixture of a crackdown on handicap placard abuse, installation of parking meters in new areas, money saved from automating payment at city parking garages, opening up some city garages for paid residential use at night, and selling ad space on the back of parking receipts. Staff would have been directed to come up with ideas to cover the rest of the gap, which was still estimated at over $300,000.

Everyone on the council was open to rolling back the enforcement hours to 7 p.m. or 6 p.m., but the resolution ultimately lost due to the uncertainty of the replacement funding. "I am not wedded to the parking meter times so much that I would be unwilling to let them be rolled back," said Councilmember Desley Brooks, who, along with Kaplan and Nancy Nadel, voted against the proposal. "What I am wedded to is a real budget that makes sense for this city."

The vote came after a long, sometimes heated public comment period with rowdy applause.

"What kind of city government attacks its own residents in this fashion just to raise revenues?" asked Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake Theater and the most visible leader of the parking protests. "Metering rates should be reduced to 50 cents an hour, to compete with our neighbors, or better yet, meters should be eliminated all together." Michaan also said meter enforcement should be reduced not back to 6 p.m. but to 5 p.m.

Michaan and others claimed they had seen huge declines in business since the parking enforcement changes were made in early July. Several members of the public did contest the notion that cheaper parking was the key to better business, however.

"Free evening parking doesn't actually help businesses," said Jonathan Bair, chair of the Oakland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. Grand Lake neighborhood resident Ralph Cook said the council should look to the advice of UCLA parking guru Donald Shoup, and base pricing on demand. In one of the evening's few humorous moments, Cook was interrupted by Michaan, who wanted to announce that the parking lot across the street would be closing soon. "Can I have my Kanye West 35 seconds back?" asked Cook.

He was granted his 35 seconds of lost speaking time back, and evidently the council listened to his advice on Shoup as well: there was broad support for a long-term parking study that would incorporate demand-based parking. "A lot of cities are looking at parking and setting pricing on a demand basis," said Brooks, referring to programs like SFpark in San Francisco.

Kaplan called for a Shoupian approach as well. "If all the parking spots are full, making them cheaper doesn't make the problem better, it makes it worse," said Kaplan. "We need a real study that looks at demand modeling."

At their next meeting in two weeks, the council will vote on commissioning a 45-day study to identify principles that should guide parking strategy in the city, in addition to voting on whether to roll back enforcement from 8 p.m. to 6 or 7 p.m.

There was also agreement among most councilmembers that the anger about increasing parking enforcement originated from how the changes were made, not the changes themselves. "I think that what has made people the angriest," said Kernighan, "is the fact that we changed the rules and we did not properly notify people before it happened. They felt like they were being tricked."

Quan, who supported the initial resolution to roll back enforcement to 6 p.m. even without a full plan for covering the funding gap it would create, seemed to lapse briefly into skepticism about the uproar. "Whether it's true or not" that the parking changes have caused a major decline in business, Quan said, "it's what people believe. I can't tell you how many emails I've had from people." Then again, Quan said, "there's like 300 free parking spaces within a block of the Grand Lake Theater," which the city provided several years ago at Michaan's request. Quan said she wondered if the decline in business was partially "because of the publicity and the uproar" about parking fines.

"People all over the Bay Area think if you go to the Grand Lake Theater you'll get a ticket."

The City Council ultimately is placed between an angry group of business owners and the equally daunting menace of making cuts or finding revenue elsewhere. Even an offhand suggestion earlier in the week that the funds come from the city's animal shelter program was enough to bring in three people who spoke passionately against any further cuts to that program.

The reaction that even an offhand suggestion brought was an indication of just how hard finding money elsewhere might be, Kaplan said. "I think what happened with the animal shelter was very telling," she said. "Without an actual proposal for people to speak to, it's hard to say that staff will just come up with something."

If Alameda resident Allen Michaan was the progressive he claims to be, he would ask the City of Oakland to replace four parking spaces in front of his theater with on-street bike parking. This would draw the progressive, self-propelled, young people who have recently taken up residence in Uptown, Temescal and around Lake Merritt.

But as of now, he is viewed as the leader of the car-huggers and facing a boycott by young progressive people. That may explain why business is down.

What a missed opportunity.

Perhaps the next owner of the Grand Lake will be someone who realizes market advantage in tapping into the eco-hipseters of the New Oakland.

http://www.livablestreets.com/people/Drunk_Engineer Drunk Engineer

I’m sure there are some who will flame this comment…but parking enforcement and meter revenue should not be used to bolster the city’s finances.

Even Dr. Shoup says so.

It is pretty clear that Oakland intended the increased parking fines and enforcement simply as a way of closing the budget deficit — and had nothing to do with doing market-rate parking management.

The real “progressive” solution would be to do the following:
1. Ticket revenue from speed enforcement should go to local city General Fund
2. Ticket revenue from parking enforcement should go to fund for local business district

Because cities get no revenue from speed tickets, they do zero traffic enforcement. Whereas cities do get LOTS of revenue from parking tickets.

Maybe I am crazy. I think part of city living is parking meters. I mean Berkeley has ridiculously overzealous meter enforcement. So does SF. Does that stop people from visiting.

And most of the areas in Oakland with a ton of meters have free 2-4 hour parking 1-2 blocks from the meters. When I am too cheap to pay for meters (always) I walk a little further. The only time I pay the meter actually, is when i head over to Piedmont Ave. I usually suck it up and pay the meter. I do agree with the commentary on the length of time at the meters. In the Grand-Lake area, 2 hours is not enough. And well it discourages me from doing more than Trader Joes in the neighborhood. But it is more of an issue of the 2 hours, and not anything else.

Near my office in SF, meters are $3/hr. And other nearby meters are the same and turn into no parking zones early in the afternoon. People either take transit, or pay for costly lots. Why can’t Oakland have the same?

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